How would we know to go about this? She guided the way.” “She reached out to us, and it was so nice to have her. “She kind of fell into the palm of our hand after our Kickstarter campaign,” Samantha said. Segal is one of the world’s preeminent experts on twins, with years of research into twins who were separated at birth and raised without knowledge of the other. Segal is a psychology professor and director of the Twin Studies Center at Cal State Fullerton. Samantha’s background in film let her see the potential of their story as a film, and before their first face-to-face video chat on Skype she asked Anaïs if she was OK with recording their talks.Ī Kickstarter online fundraising campaign for the documentary raised $43,838 by mid-April 2013 and also led to a contact that would help them prove beyond a doubt what their eyes and minds and hearts already believed – that they were twins, and quite likely identical, too. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – and the vast digital archives of the Internet at large – all helped them see each other and make contact by February 2013. If it were 20 years ago, neither Samantha nor Anaïs is confident that they’d have ever found each other for one very good reason: Social media that made their discovery of each other possible didn’t exist then. “And my first thought was, ‘Of course we’re twins why not? It’s too crazy to not be true.’” “And I read the message that said we were born in the same city on the same day, and I was like, “Ohhh, this could be true.’ “When I clicked into it I saw that she was real, a real, live girl,” Samantha said. First shock and denial, then acceptance that they might be related, and once the birth dates and birth city matched up, wonderment at the likelihood they were twins. In her apartment in Los Angeles, after Samantha opened Anaïs’ Facebook message, much the same happened. I wanted to tell everyone around me, but I wanted my parents to be the first people to know.” “And then I had an urge to call my parents. “I think my blood pressure just dropped and I could feel my legs being number, like marshmallows,” Anaïs said by phone last week from New York City, where she and Samantha were doing publicity for their book. When she discovered on the Internet Movie Database that they shared the same birth date, though, she felt stunned by the coincidence. At the time, I knew that I didn’t have a twin sister.” “I didn’t imagine she was my twin sister. “I was 90 percent sure we were related,” Anaïs said of her first deep dive into the Internet to research Samantha. Samantha had appeared in movies such as “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “21 & Over” and was living the young actor’s dream in L.A., waiting tables between auditions and the next part.Īnd then their worlds turned upside down. Anaïs was about to finish her studies as a fashion design student at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. They were content and happy as their 26th years unfolded. Anaïs, an only child, sometimes wished she had a sibling and more than Samantha wondered why she’d been given up for adoption.īut one of the most touching parts of the story they tell, in the book and in interviews, is how completely well-loved they were by the families that fate provided them. Samantha, who grew up with two older brothers, never thought much about what she might havemissed if she’d remained with her birth family. “Don’t freak out.”Įighteen months later, after travels that crisscrossed three continents and two oceans, including a stopover in Orange County to meet with an expert on separated twins, Anaïs and Samantha have a just-published book, “Separated Birth,” an almost-finished documentary film titled “Twinsters” and are still freaking out. 19, 1987, was it possible she might have been born in Busan, too? But having discovered that they both were born Nov. In that message, Anaïs wrote that she didn’t “want to be too Lindsay Lohan,” a reference to the remake of “The Parent Trap,” in which twins separated at birth find each other at camp. “It’s a pretty strange experience to get a message from yourself on Facebook,” she said, recalling how the face in the profile picture with Anaïs’ first contact seemed her own. “And then I got huge chills.”Ī month or two later, Samantha felt exactly the same when Anaïs first reached out to her. “My first thought was that someone had put a screen shot of me in it,” said Anaïs in British-accented English, describing the moment in December 2012 before she’d seen the full video. And yet each saw that the face looking back at her – at Anaïs, after a friend spotted Samantha in a YouTube video and sent her a screen shot, and later Samantha, after Anaïs tracked her down on Facebook – was identical to her own.
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